Bernard O'Donoghue facts for kids

Bernard O'Donoghue (born December 14, 1945) is an Irish poet and university teacher. He is known for his poetry and for teaching English literature at Oxford University.

Early Life and Learning

Bernard O'Donoghue was born on December 14, 1945, in Cullen, County Cork, Ireland. He grew up on a farm there. He once said his mother was very good at farming, even if his father wasn't.

From age five, he learned the Irish language at his local school. When he was about ten, he helped with church services. This experience, where he repeated Latin words, made him interested in the Middle Ages.

When he was 16, his father passed away suddenly. His family then moved from Ireland to Manchester, England. He went to St Bede's College, a Catholic school. Later, in 1965, he went to Lincoln College, Oxford to study English literature. He studied everything from old English poems to modern writers.

His Career and Teaching

After working for a year as a computer programmer for IBM, O'Donoghue went back to Oxford. He studied for a higher degree in Medieval studies at Lincoln College. He has stayed in Oxford ever since. However, he goes back to County Cork every year. He says having two places gives him "two perspectives."

In 1971, he became a teacher (lecturer) of English at Magdalen College, Oxford. He stayed there until 1995. It was at Magdalen College that he started writing poetry. His friend and colleague, John Fuller, encouraged him. Fuller ran the college's poetry club, and to join, you had to write a poem.

In 1995, O'Donoghue moved to Wadham College, Oxford. There, he became a Fellow and tutor in medieval English literature and the history of the English language. He was an expert in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. He also taught modern Irish literature, especially poetry. Some of his famous students include actress Rosamund Pike and writer Alan Hollinghurst. O'Donoghue stopped teaching in 2011 but remained an emeritus fellow at Wadham.

His Poetry Works

Bernard O'Donoghue's first collection of poems was Razorblades and Pencils. It was published in 1982 by John Fuller. Fuller, his colleague at Magdalen College, had a small publishing company. This company also published famous poets like W. H. Auden.

His next book, Poaching Rights, came out in Ireland in 1987. Then, another small collection, The Absent Signifier, was published in 1990.

Important Collections

O'Donoghue's book The Weakness was published in 1992. He felt this was his most important work from his time at Magdalen. His next book, Gunpowder (1995), won the 1995 Whitbread prize for Poetry. He thought that perhaps the award for Gunpowder was also a recognition of the deeper poems in The Weakness.

The medieval painting St Nicholas Rebukes the Tempest by Bicci di Lorenzo on the cover of Here Nor There by Bernard O'Donoghue, Chatto & Windus, 1999

His book Here Nor There (1999) includes a well-known poem called Ter Conatus. This poem is about a brother and sister who cannot touch each other. The title means "having tried three times." It comes from an old Roman poem, the Aeneid, where a hero tries three times to hug his lost loved ones but cannot. In O'Donoghue's poem, the brother tries to touch his sick sister three times, but his hand always falls back.

The cover of Here Nor There shows a medieval painting. This shows how much O'Donoghue is inspired by medieval art and old English poems. He loves old poems like The Seafarer and The Wanderer. He sees them as perfect short poems.

Later Works

The theme of death often appears in O'Donoghue's poetry. His book Outliving (2003) starts with a poem called The Day I Outlived My Father. This poem has sad opening lines. He often reads this poem at events.

When O'Donoghue and Faber & Faber published his Selected Poems in 2008, these favorite poems were included. The book had 100 poems. Many of them remember his childhood in rural Cork, Ireland. They show how he feels about being away from home but still wanting to return.

His next book, Farmer's Cross (2011), again uses old English themes. It includes his excellent translation of the Old English poem The Wanderer. Both Farmer's Cross and his next collection, The Seasons of Cullen Church (2016), were nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize. In The Seasons of Cullen Church, his father appears again in a poem, saying, "'Time to go back,' he said."

The Irish poet Brendan Kennelly once said that O'Donoghue's poems focus more on stories than on big ideas. O'Donoghue agreed, saying that the story is always the most important part.

Other Writings

O'Donoghue has also written about modern poetry. He wrote two studies about the famous poet Seamus Heaney. The first was Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1995). The second was The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (2008). This book included essays about Heaney's work.

He also helped edit a book called C. Day-Lewis: The Golden Bridle (2017). This book aimed to show how important C. Day-Lewis was as an English poet.

O'Donoghue has also translated poems from other languages. He translated poems by the Czech writer Zbyněk Hejda in 2005. He also made a new translation of the famous medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in 2006. Critics said he did a great job with this important old English story.

Earlier in his career, he edited two medieval books: The Courtly Love Tradition (1982) and Thomas Hoccleve Selected Poems (1982). Later, he put together Oxford Irish Quotations (1999). This book had over two thousand quotes, including one from W. B. Yeats about how Irish literature inspired him.

Awards and Recognition

Bernard O'Donoghue won the 1995 Whitbread prize for Poetry for his book Gunpowder. In 2009, he received the Cholmondeley Award. He has also been nominated many times for the T.S. Eliot Prize, a major poetry award.

In 1999, he was chosen as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2014, he took over from Seamus Heaney as the Honorary President of the Irish Literary Society of London.